wrote, as an influence in his direction for those films. "That was sort of a predecessor to this movie, in a sense", he told the BBC in 2001, "It was about two young boys and a girl in a British boarding school who had to fight a supernatural force." Scenes from Young Sherlock Holmes were subsequently used to cast the first Harry Potter film. On 3 January 2010, Irish journalist Declan Lynch (writing in The Sunday Independent) stated that "there's more than a hint of young Sherlock evident in Harry". Troll The 1986 Charles Band-produced low-budget horror/fantasy film Troll, directed by John Carl Buechler and starring Noah Hathaway, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sonny Bono, features a character named "Harry Potter Jr." In an interview with M. J. Simpson, Band claimed: "I've heard that J. K. Rowling has acknowledged that maybe she saw this low-budget movie and perhaps it inspired her." However, a spokesman for Rowling, responding to the rumors of a planned remake of the film, has denied that Rowling ever saw it before writing her book. Rowling has said on record multiple times that the name "Harry Potter" was derived in part from a childhood friend, Ian Potter, and in part from her favourite male name, Harry. On 13 April 2008, The Mail on Sunday wrote a news article claiming that Warner Bros. had begun a legal action against Buechler; however, the story was denied and lawyers for Rowling demanded the article be removed. On 14 April 2008, John Buechler's partner in the Troll remake, Peter Davy, said about Harry Potter, "In John's opinion, he created the first Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling says the idea just came to her. John doesn't think so. There are a lot of similarities between the theme of her books and the original Troll. John was shocked when she came out with Harry Potter." Groosham Grange Groosham Grange (first published in 1988), a novel by best-selling British author Anthony Horowitz, has been cited for its similarities with Harry Potter; the plot revolves around David Eliot, a teenager mistreated by his parents who receive an unexpected call from an isolated boarding school, Groosham Grange, which reveals itself as a school for wizards and witches. Both books feature a teacher who is a ghost, a werewolf character named after the French word for "wolf" (Lupin/Leloup), and passage to the school via railway train. Horowitz, however, while acknowledging